The Virginia Defamation Law Blog

January 30, 2023

Qualified Privilege Insufficient Basis for Pretrial Dismissal

It’s never a good idea to slander another person, but in some circumstances a privilege may apply to a defamatory statement that exempts the statement from any libel or slander claims. Statements made on the witness stand in a legal proceeding, for example, are immune from defamation claims (even if they are false). The justice system is designed to sort out which witnesses are lying and which are telling the truth; it doesn’t permit an aggrieved individual to sue witnesses who offered unfavorable testimony during the trial. In other contexts, a “qualified” privilege may apply to the communication. In these situations, the privilege is not absolute and will be forfeited if abused. A qualified privilege generally attaches to communications between persons on a subject in which the persons share an interest or duty. For example, consider the employee performance review, where the person completing the review form and the person receiving it both share an interest or duty in the review being conducted. In situations like these, the reviewer is generally permitted–and expected–to include whatever negative feedback may be appropriate without having to worry about getting sued by the employee for defamation. However, this privilege is not absolute; a qualified privilege does not give the reviewer a license to maliciously defame another individual with impunity.

Defamatory words uttered with malice will not be protected by qualified privilege. This means that a plaintiff may often be able to pursue a defamation claim even when the claim is based on a statement made in a privileged context. A plaintiff can overcome the qualified privilege with clear and convincing evidence that the defendant made the statement with “malice” (not to be confused with “actual malice.”) Malice in this context can be shown in a variety of ways, such as a showing that (1) the statements were made with knowledge that they were false or with reckless disregard for their truth; (2) the statements were communicated to third parties who have no duty or interest in the subject matter; (3) the statements were motivated by personal spite or ill will; (4) the statements included strong or violent language disproportionate to the occasion; or (5) the statements were not made in good faith. (See Cashion v. Smith, 286 Va. 327, 339 (2013)).

December 31, 2022

Differences Between Virginia and D.C. Defamation Law

by Lee E. Berlik

Defamation law in Virginia and Washington, D.C. is identical in most material respects. Choice-of-law principles usually won’t make much of a difference to the outcome of a defamation case. Both Virginia and D.C. follow the general principles of defamation law that are recognized throughout the United States. There are, however, some notable differences in terms of the specific rules and legal standards that apply to defamation cases. Today’s blog post summarizes some of the key differences that might affect how you choose to present your case or where you intend to bring it.

Defamation Per Se

Virginia recognizes both defamation per se and defamation per quod. In the District of Columbia, the law in this area is less clear. Defamation per se is a type of defamation that is considered so damaging to a person’s reputation that it is automatically assumed to be defamatory, without the need for the plaintiff to prove actual damages. In Virginia, defamatory statements qualify as “per se” defamatory if they (1) impute the commission of a crime involving moral turpitude; (2) impute that the plaintiff is infected with a contagious disease which would exclude the party from society; (3) impute an unfitness to perform the duties of a job or a lack of integrity in the performance of those duties; or (4) prejudice the party in his or her profession or trade. In the District, there isn’t a lot of authority recognizing defamation per se in any situation other than one involving a false statement relating to the commission of a serious crime. (See, e.g., Raboya v. Shrybman & Assocs., 777 F. Supp. 58, 59 (D.D.C. 1991) (“In the District of Columbia, in order to be actionable as libel per se, the contents of a defamatory publication must “impute…the commission of some criminal offense for which [the Plaintiff] may be indicted and punished, if the charge involves moral turpitude and is such as will injuriously affect [the Plaintiff’s] social standing, or,…the question is whether, from the language attributed to defendant, there is something from which commission of a crime can be inferred.’”)). Thus, a plaintiff contemplating a defamation claim based on a false statement prejudicing the plaintiff in his or her profession would usually be better off bringing the claim in Virginia, where damages may be presumed. Continue reading

November 12, 2022

If Truth is Apparent From the Pleadings, Case May Be Dismissed

by Lee E. Berlik

You may have heard that truth is a complete defense to a claim of defamation. That’s essentially true, but here in Virginia, it’s more accurate to say that a plaintiff must prove falsity as part of his case in chief. Whether a statement claimed to be defamatory is true or false is normally an issue reserved for trial to be determined by a jury. That’s because it’s an issue of fact (as opposed to a question of law, which the judge can decide without deference to the jury). This means that in most cases, a defendant won’t be able to get a defamation claim dismissed on demurrer (i.e., thrown out at the very beginning of the litigation process, without the need for a trial) on the basis that the alleged defamatory statement is true and therefore not actionable. Trials are usually necessary to determine whether the statement is, in fact, true. Sometimes, however, the truth of the allegedly defamatory statement is apparent from the face of the pleadings. When this is the case, trial courts have been known to sustain demurrers.

A recent example comes from the County of Dinwiddie, Virginia (population 28,000). The facts of Dennis F. Harrup III v. Collison F. Royer et al. go something like this. Dennis Harrup owns Harrup Real Estate, LLC (“HRC”). HRC took out a loan of roughly one million dollars with Blue Ridge Bank, secured by a deed of trust (i.e., mortgage) establishing liens on several properties located throughout Richmond, Petersburg, and Lancaster. The deed of trust contained a provision restricting HRC’s right to sell the secured properties. In contravention of this restriction, HRC managed to sell one of the houses. A title search, for reasons that aren’t clear, did not reveal the liens held by Blue Ridge Bank. In the course of the sale, Mr. Harrup signed a “no financing agreement” indicating that he owned the house personally and that there were no liens or encumbrances against it. The documents clearly showed that both of these assertions were false–the property was owned by HRC, not Harrup personally, and there was a substantial lien against it held by Blue Ridge Bank.

September 1, 2022

Trying to Get Someone Fired Is Risky Business

by Lee E. Berlik

When relationships go bad, it’s not uncommon for one of the parties to seek to embarrass or harm the other by “exposing” the person for the horrible human being that he or she is. I see this most often in the form of revenge porn, social media bullying campaigns, and in efforts to contact the other person’s spouse or employer to disrupt those relationships and possibly get the other person fired. I’ve written earlier about how the First Amendment may protect informing another’s employer of harmful information if those allegations are completely true, but doing so carries risk. If the employer acts on the information and the employee suffers an adverse employment action, the whistleblower may face liability for defamation and tortious interference, particularly if the employee can convince the court that the statements or their implications are untrue.

Consider the case of Selamawit Teka* v. Jonathan Jack. In August 2021, Teka sued Jack in federal court, complaining that “Jack engaged in a course of unlawful and unauthorized contact with Teka’s employer, wherein he publicized and exposed personal details of Teka’s private life to those she works for without cause, reason or justification. In these communications, Jack publicized and exposed the contents of private social media conversations, and other details of Teka’s personal life, dealings, conversations and activity, to those with no legitimate interest or concern in her private affairs. Jack defamed Teka and violated her right to privacy with the intent to insult, humiliate and embarrass Teka, and get her fired.” The court was not impressed with the invasion-of-privacy claims, but it was persuaded that Teka had alleged a plausible cause of action for defamation and denied Jack’s motion to dismiss that claim.

July 27, 2022

Defamation Claim Against Shenandoah University Goes Forward

by Lee E. Berlik

Last year I wrote a post about how it can be defamatory for an employer to misrepresent the reasons for an employee’s termination. If an employer says that an employee was fired because of reasons X, Y, and Z, the employee may have a valid defamation claim even if statements X, Y, and Z are all completely true. If the reason for the employee’s termination had nothing to do with those pretextual reasons, then the employer’s statement, taken as a whole, is false and therefore potentially defamatory. A case came across my desk today involving a very similar issue: whether a university can be held liable for defamation when announcing that a student’s dismissal from a degree program was due to certain seemingly valid and legitimate concerns based on the student’s failure to pass a required test, when the student’s dismissal was actually due to something else entirely. Consistent with earlier rulings, the court found that on these alleged facts, the plaintiff had presented a viable defamation claim.

The case is John Doe v. Shenandoah University. The alleged facts of the case, according to the opinion, go something like this. The plaintiff was born in Nigeria and emigrated to the United States, where he is now a permanent resident. He enrolled in the Physician Assistant Studies Program (“PA Program”) at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia. At some point after his enrollment, he developed Social Anxiety Disorder, a health condition characterized by extreme fear of social settings. He requested and received various accommodations due to this disorder, such as (a) time and a half for all quizzes and examinations and (b) testing in a quiet, distraction-free environment. One test he was required to pass as part of the PA Program was the Objective Structured Clinical Exam (“OSCE”), a “time-limited practical exam conducted at the end of certain semesters in the PA program” consisting of “a set of predefined stations related to patient care.”

May 6, 2022

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard Should Both Lose

by Lee E. Berlik

The Depp v. Heard defamation trial in Virginia isn’t over yet, but everyone seems to have already picked a side. Whether you’re one of the 7.5 billion people viewing #justiceforjohnnydepp on TikTok or one of the 26 million checking out #justiceforamberheard, chances are that if you’re interested in the case, you have an opinion about which side should win. And if we’re talking odds here, you’re probably on Team Johnny. But how many of you actually know what this case is about? Contrary to what all the viral memes would have you believe, the case isn’t actually about which party was “the abuser” in the relationship. This case isn’t about men’s rights, #MeToo, or #BelieveWomen. It is a lawsuit involving competing claims of defamation that will require a jury of seven people to make very specific findings of fact on a limited number of issues. If the jury does its job and focuses solely on answering the questions the judge will soon instruct them to answer, there is a good chance that both Johnny and Amber will lose this case and return to their California homes empty-handed. From what I’ve seen of the evidence so far, neither side has a particularly strong case.

February 23, 2022

Section 230 May Apply Where Claim Based on the Publication of Speech, Whatever the Theory of Liability

by Lee E. Berlik

You’ve heard by now that companies like Facebook and Twitter are not liable for defamation when their platforms are used to circulate false and defamatory content. The law most often cited as the source of this protection is known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 provides protection to companies that supply the platform, forum, or other technology that others can use to communicate information, provided the companies are not involved in creating the content that gets posted on their sites. Section 230 generally allows such companies to moderate and delete content without losing immunity, but not create content themselves. Although Section 230 protects internet companies from liability as a publisher of speech, it does not protect them in situations where liability is sought on some other theory, such as intellectual property infringement or liability as the seller of a defective product.

In the case of Tyrone Henderson v. The Source for Public Data, the Eastern District of Virginia was faced with the question of whether Section 230 could apply to claims raised under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The issue had apparently never come up before, but the court readily determined that Section 230 did apply because the defendants were being sued for publishing content created by others and were not involved in creating that content themselves. Section 230 is not limited to defamation claims and can be invoked in any case where its requirements are satisfied.

December 29, 2021

Retweets Do Not Extend the Statute of Limitations

by Lee E. Berlik

The statute of limitations for defamation claims in Virginia is just one year from the date of publication. “Publication” in this context refers to the communication of the defamatory statement to a third party. A person who repeats a defamatory statement originally made by someone else can sometimes be held liable for republishing the statement. That republication would constitute a new defamation claim and trigger a new one-year period under the statute of limitations. Republication liability, however, generally requires some evidence that the person repeating the defamation is vouching for the statement’s accuracy or adopting it as his/her own. Merely sharing someone else’s defamatory statement, without adding to it in some way or directing it to a new audience, will usually not give rise to defamation liability and will therefore not extend the statute of limitations beyond one year from the original publication.

In the Lokhova v. Halper case I wrote about last year, the plaintiff sued The New York Times and other publications roughly two years after they published articles about her that she believed were defamatory. She argued that her claim was not time-barred because several people had tweeted links to the articles in question within the 12-month period prior to her filing of the lawsuit. The court rejected her argument and dismissed the case, finding that merely sharing an article with others does not necessarily amount to republication. The article was already on the internet. Re-tweeting it, opined the court, is the equivalent of sharing a hard-copy book or magazine with another person. Doing so does not amount to a new publication that would trigger a new one-year period within which a defamation claim might be brought.

October 31, 2021

Discovery Requests Must Be Reasonable

by Lee E. Berlik

In a defamation case, like any other form of civil litigation, each side has a right of “discovery” to obtain information from each other and from third parties that may be relevant to the dispute. When the rules work as intended, there are no unexpected surpise witnesses or documents at trial–each side should be well aware of the information the other side intends to present at trial so they can plan accordingly. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 allows parties to “obtain discovery regarding any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1). This rule allows parties to obtain just about any form of evidence provided it’s relevant and not protected by the attorney-client privilege, work-product doctrine, or other privilege. And for purposes of discovery, most courts apply a lower standard for relevance than they would apply at trial. Information may be discoverable even if only slightly relevant to the case, provided the burden of obtaining and producing the information is justified by the needs of the case. Generally speaking, the less money there is at stake in the litigation, the more relevant the information will have to be before a court will order a party to produce it in discovery. The rules dictate the courts consider “the importance of the issues at stake in the action, the amount in controversy, the parties’ relative access to relevant information, the parties’ resources, the importance of the discovery in resolving the issues, and whether the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit” in assessing whether to compel a party to incur expense or burden in producing information not easily accessible. (See Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1)).

You can also obtain information from third parties who aren’t involved in the litigation if they are in possession of relevant information. This is accomplished through the issuance of subpoenas. (See Fed. R. Civ. P. 45(1)(A)(iii)). Courts typically won’t require third parties to incur substantial burden or expense unless the information is highly relevant and not obtainable from other sources, as third parties aren’t involved in the case and have no stake in the outcome. When a subpoena is directed to a third party, “courts must give the recipient’s nonparty status ‘special weight,’ leading to an even more ‘demanding and sensitive’ inquiry than the one governing discovery generally.” (See Va. Dep’t of Corrs. v. Jordan, 921 F.3d 180, 189 (4th Cir. 2019)). In particular, courts will consider (1) the extent to which the requesting party actually needs the information, measured by whether the information is likely to offer value over and above what the requesting party already has; (2) whether the requesting party can obtain the same or comparable information from other sources; and (3) the extent to which the request will impose a substantial burden on the recipient or others who might be affected (such as cost, overbreadth, privacy, and confidentiality interests).

September 20, 2021

Why Nona Gaprindashvili Is Suing Netflix for False Light

by Lee E. Berlik

A 1968 story in the New York Times reports that “Nona Gaprindashvili of the Soviet Union, the women’s world chess champion,” defeated seven men at an international chess tournament in Sweden, where she was the only woman in the field. In the 1983 book, The Queen’s Gambit, which tells the fictional story of an American girl who rises from humble beginnings to become a top chess player, the author mentions Ms. Gaprindashvili by name in the book’s final chapter set at a prestigious chess tournament in Moscow, noting that she had “met all these Russian Grandmasters many times before.” Netflix released a popular series based on the book which concludes as the book did with the climactic tournament. And just as in the book, Netflix invoked Gaprindashvili’s name for dramatic effect. But they changed one detail. “There’s Nona Gaprindashvili,” an announcer says, while the camera pans to an actress resembling her. “But she’s the female world champion and has never faced men.”

Gaprindashvili, now 80 years old and living in Tbilisi, Georgia, was appalled to learn that her professional accomplishments had been diminished by the series and filed a lawsuit in California last week for defamation and “false light.” To me, the case provides a good illustration of the limitations of defamation law and the reasons some states recognize a cause of action for “false light.” (I should note here that Virginia is not one of those states.)